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Building a dedicated PC for NAS

D

dennismv

n00b
Joined
Jun 27, 2005
Messages
38
Having a budget of say $1,000 to $1,500, I want to build a 16Tb NAS machine.

What kind of considerations should I pay attention to?
  • any particular RAID card(s)?
  • any particular hard drives?
  • any specific motherboard?
  • any specific RAID configuration?

This will be for low-end home use for storage, backup, organization, and availability. My plans are first to put all my data on it, sort it out, organize it, and then use it. Usage will be occasional, such as pulling out this or that photo folder, printing some photos, updating it if needed.

I am looking to perhaps put together a sample system, and also evaluate that maybe I can use that budget for a new system instead, and use my older hardware (A8N-E motherboard + 4Gb RAM + dual AMD1400+) for a NAS machine. Bonus is that some of my older hard drives are still IDE and that older machine has both IDE and SATA connectors.
 
For that much storage, I would be looking at ZFS or even btrfs:
http://arstechnica.com/information-...nd-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/2/

So you're looking at a setup with DDR3 ECC RAM (if Intel, you're looking at Supermicro mobos. If AMD, you're looking at certain AM2+ or FM2 mobos) and with RAIDZ2 (if using ZFS) or RAID 6 (if using btrfs or any Linux based RAID). That also means you're looking at 8 x 3TB hard drives or 6 to 7 x 4TB hard drives if you want close to 16TB of usable storage space.
 
I would strongly suggest a Synology 1512+ and 5 4tb drives with some fail over if you are interested in a prebuilt quiet machine. Also if you plan on having a reliable drive array you might be best to look at the nas type drives like the WD REDS. PM me as I actually have one sitting idle I just upgraded from, but I was using it as a Plex server which will overload the Dual Core Atoms if you transcode more than one stream at a time.
 
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